Answers

On 16 December 1943, I was sitting at the Navigator’s seat in a very noisy Lancaster bomber over Berlin when something occurred that changed the pattern of my life. We had just dropped 13,000 pounds of bombs… a 4,000 pound “cookie” plus incendiaries and we were stooging along at 163 mph (280 km/hr) taking infra-red photographs for the first time in WW2, when we were attacked from below by a German night fighter which hit the port wing and fuselage, setting the wing on fire and wrecking my instrument panel.

Several hundred gallons of petrol burning less than 20 feet from you is an occasion for rapid action in the way of evacuation of the area, which five of us did before the plane blew up or crashed. We did this through the forward escape hatch and used parachutes.